A Fighter's Heart: One Man's Journey Through the World of Fighting Read Online Free PDF

started to get his prefight massage from Kum, lying on a couple of towels on the pavement in the parking lot. Kum and I were going to be his cornermen.
    It was a wild scene, with a cheerful, carnival atmosphere. The thick outdoor crowd milled tightly around the ring, hundreds of people drunk and shouting. There wasn’t another foreign face for a hundred miles. Because his fight was delayed through three or four matches, Johnny was getting more anxious. He had warmed up and then cooled off, which wastes energy. Kum was also angry, and insulted. I think Johnny was something of a draw, and Kum was a man of some standing around town.
    Before the fight, Johnny danced the full wai khru and ram muay that the Lumpini fighters do, and the crowd roared its approval, cheering him on; the Thai fight enthusiasts always love it when the farang respect their traditions. The wai khru and ram muay are traditional dances that all Thai fighters perform before they fight, dances to honor their families and teachers. The dance appeases superstitious spirits but also centers the fighter, brings him back to himself. The musicians played throughout the fight, blowing and thumping with cigarettes in their hands.
    After he finished, Johnny looked at me and the heaving sea of brown faces and said, “I’ve never been so scared in my life.”
    Johnny had a right to be scared. He was fighting a Thai who had been born into the sport. The Thai looked young, but just the fact that he was Thai was scary enough: He might be sixteen, but have five years and fifty fights.
    In the beginning of the fight, Johnny dominated. He was bigger and stronger, and every time they clinched, Johnny would throw his man to the ground. But there was a cost. He was too tense, too worked up, and tiring quickly. After every clinch, his hands were lower; he was obviously struggling for air. Kum was trying to get through to him, calling, “ Sabai sabai, ” and I was translating, yelling, “Relax!” at him. Kum picked it up, and trying to be heard over the din, began yelling with me, “Re-lax!”
    Johnny counted himself out in the third—just lay back on the ropes and gestured “No more” to the referee. The other fighter couldn’t believe it and threw his hands in the air like he’d just won a title. I was angry with John at first, although I understood the line of fear and exhaustion he was walking. He wasn’t hurt at all, just completely out of breath, and I knew within twenty seconds he was going to be wondering why he had quit like that. He was quiet on the way home. We sat in the pickup bed and watched the stars.
    Eventually, we talked a little about the fight, just Johnny and me. We came through to a rationale. The problem was breathing. Whenever Johnny was in the clinch, straining to throw his opponent down, for a split second he would hold his breath. This was a deadly mistake because with muay Thai you are operating at your anaerobic threshhold for almost the entire fight. Those split-second breath holds were killing Johnny. Kum and the other trainers can’t talk about this with us (here the language gap makes itself felt), but breathing is critical. In the clinch, what the Thais do is stay loose, stay on their toes, and breathe. There isn’t any straining or wrestling, or if there is, it is quick, smooth moves in rhythm with the breathing.
    Johnny was unhurt, but his voice was shaky. I could tell he was angry and a little ashamed to have lost the fight, but as we talked and figured out what had happened, he cheered up, and by the time the sun rose the next day, he was back to his old form, cracking jokes about everything he saw.
     
     
    The next morning, Kum commandeered a truck, and we rode through the countryside in the hot sun, past rice paddies and thick forest, and stopped and wandered up to a waterfall. We all stripped down to our underwear for a dip and annoyed the hell out of a Thai teenager and his girlfriend who were up there for a make-out